The App I Wrote At Summer Camp

This story appears in the September 10, 2012 issue of Forbes.
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Matt Dillabough (left) and Max Colbert (right), along with their assistant app intructors William Colbert (center left) and John Dillabough at the home in Silicon Valley where they teach coding.

Matt Dillabough's backyard in Atherton, Calif. is a kid's paradise: pool, tennis court, trampoline. But the 12 children he has over are all inside the guesthouse on laptops, learning how to write iPhone apps.

And Matt, 13, didn't actually invite them over. They're each paying him and his best friend, Max Colbert, also 13, $350 to teach them how to write an app in one week.

The rules: You have to arrive ten minutes early and make sure someone will pick you up on time. Max's dad, Brett, a vice president at NetApp, is keeping an eye on things from a corner, with his laptop open and the family's new rescue puppy nearby. "Have your apps made money?" inquires a front-row student. Colbert's answer: almost. A game he wrote has 100,000 downloads. The game is free, but he has charged 99 cents in the past.

Matt and Max started the Menlo App Academy last fall after being unimpressed with their school's computer classes, which they describe as "typing." They're convinced that software development is a vital skill at even the youngest of ages. Kids from Texas and Tokyo have asked about attending remotely. The CEO of security technology firm Fortinet enrolled his son, as did Chris Espinosa, who was Apple's eighth employee and pioneered Apple's mobile development tools.

The boys have big plans for turning the academy into a kind of digital Boy Scouts of America. Up next: Android classes. "We need to be multiplatform, no doubt," Matt says. "Technology changes fast."

I enjoy discovering hidden gems: little-known, hard-charging entrepreneurs with disruptive ideas (and a track record of success). During a decade-long stretch at Forbes Magazine, I authored early profiles of Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, Drew Houston of the Web file-shari...